This invention relates to shower doors, and more particularly to shower door attachment assemblies.
Shower doors help enclose a shower or tub area to prevent water from collecting on the floor outside the shower area, while also allowing entry to the shower area. Conventional shower door assemblies have one or more doors, each having a frame in which a panel of plastic or glass is mounted.
The shower frame can be slidably attached to a fixed track mounted at the top (and usually also at the bottom) of the door opening. At the top of each shower door glides or rollers are typically mounted on hangers, and each glide or roller is movably supported on a fixed track mounted above the shower door opening. The shower door slides along the track to allow access to the shower area. Multiple doors in an assembly are typically offset from each other to allow doors on separate tracks to pass each other. See generally U.S. Pat. No. 4,769,949.
If the surface of a tub has a slight downward bow, or if the curb, track or frame is otherwise out of plumb, a shower door may bind. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a shower door attachment assembly that can compensate for this.
Prior art systems, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,769,949, do allow for bowed tubs or out of plumb doors in the vertical direction, but the correction is sometimes unduly complex, expensive, or subject to breakage. Additionally, prior art systems which allow movement in the vertical direction may have a tendency to allow the shower doors to swing in the transverse direction (in and out of the tub) which may cause the door to derail.
A particular system, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,446 has a vertically slidable connector with a cylindrical bottom retained in a track of a curb. The track restrains the connector in the transverse direction to prevent the shower door from swinging. This particular configuration has a connector that must be slipped into an end of the c-track prior to mounting the curb to the tub, which can be inconvenient. Also, the structures required to achieve this may disrupt the aesthetic design.
Therefore, a need exists for a shower door attachment having a vertically slidable connector, that also prevents door inward and outward swinging, and also can be easily assembled after the curb is mounted to the tub.